By design, the microfluidic chip can hold only a small amount of volume. In order to automate the manual process of pipetting fluids into the microfluidic chip, it is important to provide enough time between pipetting steps that allows a machine to perform pipetting tasks until it is ready for the next step. Without the reservoir, the machine would be unable to perform tasks needed for the next step in the protocol. Previously, connections to the microfluidic device did not have a fluid reservoir. Instead, they were directly connected to the microfluidic device preventing any sort of open architecture that would allow changes to the protocol to be easily performed.